San Francisco – The forest manager’s nightmare of struggling to manage widely dispersed forestry assets in remote, challenging, and inaccessible locations is now a thing of the past with PlanetWatchers’ new Foresights Analytics Platform (Foresights).
PlanetWatchers, a geospatial intelligence and enterprise natural resource monitoring services company, is the first startup in the new space revolution ecosystem with a working, proven, industry-specific geospatial analytics solution already deployed in the field.
PlanetWatchers developed Foresights, a powerful risk management and analytics platform, specifically to help clients manage forestry assets quickly, effectively, and accurately by providing stronger insights and improved identification of areas of new or potential risk. Currently delivering operations tracking and forest damage management services, Foresights will add satellite-driven analytics, inventory data, and forest productivity services before the end of 2018.
Foresights’ improved platform covers larger geographic areas and delivers results faster and more accurately than traditional project-based companies, traditional inventory methods and off-the-shelf processing tools. PlanetWatchers combines multi-source satellite imagery data, topography maps, soil maps, meteorological data, and near real-time ground input from operational teams to deliver optimized insights. The tool is capable of detecting disturbances as small as 0.1 ha (0.25 ac) related to pest, disease, and drought damage.
“We’re excited about the massive impact Foresights will have on traditional forestry management,” says Ariel Smoliar, PlanetWatchers’ CEO and co-founder. “Forest manager will now be able to unlock the full potential of their assets. Foresights will help them easily access crucial business intelligence and detailed insights and analytics on a regular basis so they can make proactive and informed decisions and take immediate remedial action. Without these higher levels of data and improved frequency of information, they could see negative impacts on their forestry management decisions, their supply chains, and, ultimately, their profits.”
Geoprocessing divisions as well as the operations, planning, and growth and yield departments in commercial forestry enterprises will benefit greatly from this state-of-the art platform that provides deep visibility on all geographically-distributed forestry assets. Reports identifying locations that require immediate mitigation can be viewed in existing GIS systems and are geolocated for forestry field teams, including offline capabilities for teams operating in remote areas without cellular reception.
“Foresights also fills a data gap known as the ‘Last Mile of Analytics’,” adds Smoliar. “When we deliver satellite images to our clients, they shouldn’t have to then analyze and extract information. We remove this pain point for them by providing deep analysis of optical and radar satellite images, and compiling actionable insights and reports, including detailed maps of locations of interest. Our clients are shown not only the location of the disturbance, but also the issue and its cause, granting them vital intelligence they can act on with very little lag time. Foresters will no longer need to process or analyze imagery: this is the game-changing value of the Last Mile of Analytics.”
The Forest Operations service provides foresters with insights to track progress of various forest harvest operations such as thinning and clearcutting. This information assists operations managers in optimizing their wood supply chain and efficiently and effectively managing resources.
The Forest Disturbance service delivers location-specific reports to forest owners and managers detailing areas with identifiable disturbances that could degrade the quality, yield, and profitability of forests. Some disturbances that Foresights can identify to help commercial foresters respond proactively include growth and uniformity issues over time, illegal logging, insect infestations and disease, competitive vegetation, storm damage, drought, wildfires, and more.
PlanetWatchers delivers an exceptional level of deep intelligence, analytics, and measurable results via its proprietary processes of combining advanced artificial intelligence algorithms, elastic cloud infrastructure, and multi-source satellite imagery developed by the company. Multiple data sources are consolidated and analyzed and then interpreted and packaged into actionable business intelligence for clients to facilitate optimal management of natural assets at regional or global levels.
